The Searsburg project is just like all the other wind projects out there: paid for by regular folks like us. In exchange for $3 million to fund that project, Green Mountain Power agreed to share information with the rest of the industry.

I just want to know, will you share with me, as one of the people of America who helped pay for it, information about its operation. Over and over again we hear about how much power it is “capable” of producing and how many homes it “can” power. Us regular folks want to know what it actually produces and when.

Tell us what power it has made that was actually used in the grid. If a coal, nuclear or hydro facility stops producing power unexpectedly, does the grid manager get nervous? Yes. If Searsburg stops producing, does anybody notice? No. Because nobody was counting on it. Since you don’t know when it will produce or how much it will produce, grid managers don’t rely on wind power.

On another note, Ms. Schnure from GMP, mentioned a neighboring industrial wind project in Searsburg. This project is being built on land that was preserved with American citizen’s tax dollars. When I ponder why it is that our dollars are spent this way, I don’t take into account the eventual handing over of it to a Spanish industrial wind developer like Iberdrola.

Some additional notes: American citizens will most likely be paying 30 percent of Iberdrola’s project costs. Iberdrola is scheduled to take $1 billion free dollars from the American taxpayer in 2010. Also, rapid depreciation is the norm, the unreliable, low value power sells at a very high, confidential price, and they also sell the renewable energy credits to, for example, a coal-fired plant in Massachusetts.

That will be this coal-fired plant’s license to keep polluting, at the same time raising their customers rates while further lining the pockets of Iberdrola in a very big way. And finally, 28,000 bear clawed beech trees were found in the vicinity of this proposed Iberdrola project. One of the many reasons why it’s part of the National Forest.

All these sacrifices for a power source that can’t even come close to doing the work in the grid that Vermont Yankee does. Hydro, biomass, cow-power, solar and community scale wind, we’ve got renewable options a plenty. Vermont doesn’t have to do this to her mountains. Call up Colleen Madrid in the Rutland office of the National Forest and politely ask her to deny approval of the Iberdrola “Deerfield Wind” project.

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